The Key Factors And Management Strategy Of Bi-directional Knowledge Transfer Between Research And Development Departments Of MNC’s Parent Company And Subsidiary

As China’s reform and open policies are continuously pushing into a more deep level as well as the economy rapidly expanding, China has been a key market and base of technology innovation and product development of MNCs. After entering into the knowledge economy era, knowledge innovation is one of the key competencies and the root of survival of the MNCs in global competition. As the fundamental process of global innovation network of MNCs, knowledge transfer is a primary approach and hub of MNCs’knowledge sharing, innovation system. So, knowledge transfer, especially for the knowledge transfer between MNCs’subsidiaries and parent company is a hot topic of international business administration and knowledge management academic fields.This article manages to conduct the study by analyzing the real case of the bi-directional knowledge transfer between the research and development departments of a MNCs parent company and subsidiary in China. First, finds out all the affecting factors and the impacts of the mutual effects of specific affecting factors to extend the former studies in this area; second, analyzes the mechanism how these affecting factors and the mutual effects of affecting factors impact the process of knowledge transfer, and verifies the actual result by analyzing the real case; last, works out a more complete model to analyze the affecting factors and mutual effects of specific affecting factors which impacts the process of knowledge transfer and makes it as a theoretical guidance for management practice of the managers.From the real case analyzing, the article found two main categories of the affecting factors which influences the process of knowledge transfer between the research and development departments of a MNCs parent company and its China subsidiary. The first are contexts of knowledge transferring, they are 1) knowledge context,2) recipient context,3) activity context,4) relational context. The second, we have to notice the mutual effects of specific affecting factors of knowledge transfer which will dramatically affect the process of knowledge transferring, the article found two pairs of them,1) the mutual effect between the communication and knowledge conflict;2) the mutual effect between the innovation tendency and the urgency of the development task. The last is that, in the context of IT research and development department, the knowledge transferring between parent company and its subsidiary is more of bi-directional. So it is very important to focus on the context of knowledge and to improve the efficiency of knowledge transferring by narrowing down the scope of knowledge which is necessary to be transferred by categorizing the characteristics of knowledge more accurately.